A Thread of Truth (9 page)

I thought to myself that, even if this video was the harbinger of disaster that I was absolutely certain it was, at least it had gotten us past the awkward events of Friday night.

Mary Dell looked straight into the camera and smiled genuinely, speaking to her invisible audience of viewers (millions and millions of them, as Charlie would say) as if they were old friends. She looked so comfortable, as if she did this every day, which, I reminded myself, she did. But still. She hadn't always been a television personality.

Back in Texas, when I first met her, she was just plain, old Mary Dell…no. Not plain. Mary Dell was a lot of things, but you could never have called her plain. Nothing, from the pointy tips of her pink faux-leopard-print pumps to the wide streaks of blond on her newly highlighted hairdo, was plain. It never had been. Even in the ordinariness of her pre-celebrity life, taking care of Howard, shopping for groceries at the Piggly Wiggly, hanging out in my sewing room while we quilted, and laughed, and talked each other through the peaks and valleys of life, including my divorce, Mary Dell sparkled.

I smiled as I watched her holding up a quilt block she said she'd worked on that weekend, telling the cameraman to zoom in close so everybody could see what a wreck she'd made of it.

“Just look at those points.” She clucked and shook her head. “They aren't within a mile of meeting at the center.” And she was right; they weren't.

“Well,” she laughed, “it just goes to show you. If you're just dying to try out a new recipe for mojitos, don't do it at the same time you're trying to sew the points on an eight-pointed star, you hear what I'm telling you?” Her expression became mockingly serious. “Learn from my mistakes, children. I am not a role model.”

She laughed again and everyone—Margot, Garrett, Ivy, and I—laughed with her. It was no wonder that
Quintessential Quilting
had the House and Home Network's fastest growing audience. How many other quilt show hosts would let the audience see their blunders? She gave people permission to take risks, to try and enjoy taking on new, more challenging projects even if the results weren't always perfect. Even people who'd never quilted and never wanted to tuned in to
Quintessential Quilting.
I could see why. Mary Dell was just plain fun to watch.

Look at you, girl. You could give Barbara Walters a run for her money. How did you ever learn to do this?

Mary Dell tossed her pathetically off-center quilt block off to the side with an exaggerated shrug. “Well, that one's a lost cause, but I want to tell you about a cause that's anything but, about a battle that millions of people around the globe are fighting and winning, thanks to the help of quilters like you…”

“This is it!” Garrett exclaimed and turned the volume up.

Everyone leaned toward the screen. I shifted nervously in my chair, resting the point of my chin on my balled-up fist.

“On September 26th, quilters across the country will head to their local quilt shops to participate in the annual Quilt Pink Day. Working together, they will create thousands of quilts that will be auctioned online with one hundred percent of the net proceeds being donated to Susan G. Komen for the Cure and their fight to end breast cancer.”

Now it was Mary Dell leaning closer to us, her eyes warm, her teasing Texas twang modulated into softer, more subtle tones.

“Chances are that you, or someone you know, has been affected by this disease and, naturally, many of us are looking for a way to help. One of my dearest friends, a woman named Evelyn Dixon, owner of Cobbled Court Quilts in New Bern, Connecticut, is doing her part by hosting a Quilt Pink event.” Mary Dell smiled. “Evelyn is a very special lady with an amazing story that I think she should tell you herself.”

The tape rolled, showing Mary Dell and me sitting around a cutting table in the shop, hundreds of bolts of fabric serving as backdrop. Mary Dell looked gorgeous and relaxed. I looked like exactly what I was, a woman who had no experience with cameras and found them terrifying, a quilt shop owner who was so busy tending to business that she hadn't been to the gym in eight months.

That's it. I'm going for a long walk first thing tomorrow. And I'm buying a scale. Look at me. I'm white as a sheet. Looks like I could lose my lunch at any moment,
I thought to myself and then smiled a little, remembering that, not too long after that take, I'd done exactly that.

Mary Dell began, sweeping one hand, bejeweled with several enormous gemstone rings, wide to encompass the whole shop. “As you can see, I'm here with my friend Evelyn Dixon in her absolutely beautiful shop, Cobbled Court Quilts in New Bern, Connecticut.” She turned to me. “Evelyn, a couple of years ago you hosted your first Quilt Pink Day here at Cobbled Court Quilts. What made you decide to do that?”

On the tape, I nodded and swallowed hard before beginning. “Um. Well…I'd picked up a magazine and seen an announcement for Quilt Pink Day and thought it would be a wonderful way for quilters in my community to come together in support of a very important cause. After getting more information, I registered Cobbled Court Quilts as an official site for Quilt Pink, one of hundreds of such sites across the country. I was very excited and very proud to be part of such a wonderful event, but at the time, I had no idea of how deeply Quilt Pink would come to affect me personally.”

“And then?” Mary Dell prodded.

“Then, on the day before the event, my doctor diagnosed me with breast cancer…”

It was hard, harder than I'd thought it would be, to watch Video Me recount the story of the early days of my diagnosis, the disbelief and fear, the denial, the sense of complete loneliness that enveloped me, newly divorced, newly relocated, broke, struggling to keep my business afloat, and facing a pronouncement of cancer in a town where I had not one close friend or family member, and how completely unprepared I was for what had come next.

I pressed my lips together and balled up my fist to cover my mouth.

Keep it together
, I coached Video Me.
Do not cry with all these people watching.

She did hold it together, but only just. People watching her probably thought she was swallowing back tears of fear as she relived those days, but it wasn't that. The hesitant catch in her voice, the threat of tears that shone in her eyes didn't come from fear, but from gratitude, from reliving a memory of a time that still amazed her, a time when three strangers, who'd come into the shop that day, each for their own reasons, with the intent of doing nothing more than making a quilt block and going home, rescued her.

Margot, Abigail, and Liza. They were the last three people in the shop that evening. They didn't know me, but when I could no longer keep down the fear I'd been forcing back since the day before when the doctor had told me about the cancer and I crumbled into a million pieces, they scooped up the broken shards, glued them back together, and stayed with me through every step of the journey. They'd rescued me.

Thank God.

Margot, efficient, sensitive, and cheerful. Abigail, stubborn, connected, and proud. Liza, raw, tender, and determined. Thank God for all of them. Remembering those three, how could I have kept my eyes from filling? People on the far side of the television screen might not have understood, but I did.

And now, I realized, Mary Dell did, too.

I shifted in my chair again, sat up straighter, as I pulled myself back from memory, not reliving the story now, but observing, seeing the tale play out exactly as Mary Dell had known it would.

At that moment I knew that many of those “millions and millions” of people I'd been so frightened of were leaning in closer, wanting to hear the rest of the story, hoping against hope that it ended well, silently cheering when it did. Some of them were sitting home alone, reaching up with tentative fingers to touch the lump they'd been trying so desperately to ignore, and then, finally resolved, reaching for the phone. Others were searching for a pad and paper, scribbling down phone numbers and Internet addresses, happy that they'd found some way, however small, to support the battle, or honor the memory, of someone they cared about. In big cities and small towns, right at that moment, people I'd never met and never would were making decisions, taking action.

Mary Dell was right.

I hadn't wanted it, hadn't chosen it, but this was my story. It wasn't about Porter Moss or Dale Barrows. It wasn't about Mary Dell Templeton Day or speeches by the governor. It wasn't about increasing sales at Cobbled Court Quilts. And it wasn't about me.

It was about them.

As much as I hated, truly hated sitting in front of a television camera to the point where it made me physically ill, I knew that was going to be the easy part. From now until Quilt Pink Day, I was going to have to keep fifty plates spinning in the air, balancing a mix of logistical, political, personal, and operational nightmares with the determination of a commanding general and the patience of Mother Teresa. Nothing about this was going to be easy for me. Or fun. But it wasn't about me.

It was about them. About debts that can never be repaid. About doing unto others as you would have done unto you. As has been done unto you. Because whether we know it or not, we all depend on the kindness of strangers.

Ready or not, I was in.

 

As the camera panned from me back to Mary Dell and then backed away to a wider shot that took in the back wall of the shop, I was lost in my thoughts and resolutions. So lost that I no longer really heard the words that Mary Dell was speaking into her lapel microphone and paid no attention to the figure in the background.

She was only there for a moment and I was so lost in my thoughts that I barely noticed her, a woman with strong arms carrying a heavy load of fabric bolts up the stairs to the workroom. She had a light tread and blond hair that brushed her shoulders and blocked her face.

It wasn't until she twisted her neck hard to the right, flipping back her hair to expose her face and I heard the sharp, shocked intake of breath and Ivy crying out, “Oh God! Oh no!” that I realized something was wrong.

T
he television was still on, but no one was watching it.

I was surrounded by faces, and voices, and questions, the concerned voices of people trying to understand why my hands were shaking so.

“Stupid,” I whispered angrily. “So stupid. I didn't think about the cameras. I didn't know they were on. Oh, God.”

My throat felt tight, as if someone were trying to cut off my breath. The old suffocating feeling was back, the sense of dread that used to come over me when I heard the whine of the garage door opening and waited, stretched tight as a bowstring, for the door to open and reveal which Hodge had come home that night. Would he be distracted and dismissive, ignoring me completely? Impatient and critical, ready to find fault with my smallest error, omission, or careless word? Angry and aggressive, violent, looking for a place to unleash his pent-up frustration and disappointments? Or charming and light-hearted, as he'd been when I first met him all those years ago, the man who, at the time, had seemed my salvation? Until the door opened, there was no way to predict who was going to come through it, and I think he liked it that way. He liked keeping me off-balance. In the last couple of years he'd taken to showing up early or later than I'd expected him. Sometimes he'd say he was going to be in meetings all day and then show up again three hours later, or one, and rage at me because I hadn't finished everything on the to-do list he'd left for me. Once, he'd said he had a dinner meeting at the club and not to fix anything for him, then he'd showed up unannounced at six o'clock and had thrown the pot of macaroni and cheese I'd made for the kids against the wall, leaving a sick, orange-yellow smear snaking down the wall with little white tubes of macaroni clinging to it, like a canvas of bad abstract art.

There was never a moment when I could relax and be myself because I was always aware that he could walk through that door at any moment and if he didn't like what he saw, there would be consequences. Inevitable, unpredictable, irrational consequences. No matter where he was or wasn't, a sense of his menacing power stayed with me. He knew that. That's how he wanted it.

I'd never been entirely free of that feeling, not even after all these months of refuge in New Bern, but with each turn of the calendar page, and the passing of each succeeding season with no sign of Hodge, the feeling had faded. Sometimes I imagined myself as a character in one of those action movies, squealing around a corner and disappearing into a blackened alley just in time to see the car that had been chasing me speed by. After waiting a minute and another, I'd smile and say, “I think I lost him.”

What I'd forgotten was that in those movies, that moment of relief was inevitably followed by panic and terror when the prey pulled out of the shadows only to realize the predator was close behind and closing fast.

There was no place hidden enough.

It was back again in full force, the hopeless dread, the invisible but potent presence, leaning over the back of my chair and close to my ear, his voice intense but with quiet, hissed contempt. “Did you think you'd done it, Ivy? Did you really think you'd disappeared? I've known all along. It was only a matter of time.”

It was my nightmare coming true, like sitting in a small, enclosed space, a place I'd thought was shelter against the storm, and then glancing backward in the mirror to realize he was there all along. There was nowhere far enough away. Nowhere he couldn't touch us. I had been fooling myself.

My fingers were splayed; my voice was reedy and small, slipping through the gaps as if speaking through a locked grate.

“He saw it. He knows.”

Evelyn crouched down close to my chair and took my hand in hers. Her voice was soft, gentle, like she was speaking to a frightened animal. “What is it, Ivy? Tell me. Who saw you?”

“Hodge. He saw it. I know he did. He's coming.”